Archive for the ‘jamming’ Category

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New Group of Misfits

Monday, March 29th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

Last week four of my students participated in their first-ever jam. Each student has been playing for about a year and, amazingly enough, knows roughly the same songs. (Guess which ones?) They all have been introduced to vamping (F shape only, following my latest inclination to teach vamping that way first). And they all know I’m blogging about them! Zach and Matt are teenagers, while Judy and Randy are in what we might call middle part of their lives. Previous to the jam, they did not know each other, although Judy and Randy have back-to-back lessons and have played a couple of songs together as sort of a trial jam.

Zach had his hour lesson before the jam so he was well warmed up. Folks started coming in on the tail-end of his time and I told them to make themselves comfy while I took a short break. When I came back into the studio, everyone was sitting in the chairs I’d lined up but it was weird. It was completely quiet. No talking, no noodling. All four of them looked like deer caught in the headlights. Terrified is perhaps too mild a word.

As I got my banjo out, I assured them that everything was gonna be okay. That’d we’d play through the first song, Cripple Creek, all together so everyone could relax (at least a little) and no one would feel like they were on the spot. Then I had them practice their vamping together–which they all knew—while I played the banjo. Everything was smooth, so I put down the banjo and got out the guitar. They were going to fly solo.

I asked Zach to start, since he was already warmed up. My original idea was to take turns with the starting but everyone did so well with Zach leading off that I decided to let him start all the tunes and sort of preserve an order they could depend on. One less thing to worry about.

Everyone played the song one time through, and cleanly passed to the next person. In clear violation of my own stated policy (what are rules if not to be broken?) I told them that if they absolutely could not keep going when they messed up that we would stop and let them start again. This being their first jam, I thought nothing would be gained by having them sitting there, embarrassed, and not being able to recover from a mistake. That can come later. (The embarrassment and the recovering!)

They were lined up in this order, Zach, Randy, Judy, Matt, and for the first couple of songs we just stopped cold after Matt got done. Later on, I had Zach pick back up when Matt finished his break. But at first I was trying to make things as easy as possible.

We played though Cripple Creek, its sister song Banjo in the Hollow, then Cumberland Gap, and Boil Them Cabbage Down. Matt was just learning Cabbage, and didn’t quite have it down, so he just vamped. And seemed content to do so.

This was about the smoothest first jam I’ve ever been a part of. Of course they are all excellent, serious students who practice and do their part. But I like to think that I prepared them better than I have prepared students in the past. (Check out “We Are Jamming” from my book if you want to hear how my first-ever student jam went! I had so much to learn!)

One thing I am doing differently in my teaching is that I am encouraging the beginners to memorize those first few chord patterns. We’ve been starting with Cripple Creek and I show it to them a measure at a time (four beats) and get them to memorize it. Of course they are memorizing it WHILE THEY ARE PLAYING IT, which is considerably different from trying to memorize a chord pattern from paper. We talk about the “off” beat, find that, and then I tell them the first measure is GGCG and we vamp it. Then we do the next measure—GGDG—the same way. Then we put the two together. At this point, I’ve not even played the banjo with them. But now, I bring out the banjo and show them where to come in, and off we go! (Note: all these vamp chords are taught on the Vamping DVD!)

We learn the B part the same way, then put the two parts together. After they are comfy with that, then I show them how to come in after the vamping. (Leave off the last beat of G and get in there!)

I follow Cripple Creek with Banjo in the Hollow, because the A part chords exactly the same way. I used to think the B part was too hard to chord—CGCGCGDG—all that flipping back and forth between C and G, but the students seem to do fine with it. Boil Them Cabbage, Cumberland Gap, I Saw the Light, and Do Lord all follow and, so far, everybody is doing really well.

And this is the neat part: as some point they stop counting and start listening and hearing the changes. And you know I love that! I’ll keep you posted on future progress, but right now I am one happy teacher! Happy, girl, that’s me!

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WillFest 2010

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Red Henry

Red Henry

Chris, Jenny (his fiddle-playing girlfriend), and I drove down to Florida recently for the Will McLean folk music festival, and we had a great time. It was a long way for us to go, being held not far from Tampa, but it was certainly worth the drive.

The festival is named in honor of Florida’s pioneering folksinger and songwriter, Will McLean. A highly individualistic and creative person known as “Florida’s Black-Hat Troubadour,” Will influenced many other musicians and blazed the way for the rest of us who followed after.

We arrived at the show on Friday afternoon and promptly started warming up–we had a set to play at 7:00. And the set went great. We played a mix of bluegrass and Florida Folk material, and our friend Ron Johnson posted our two-guitar harmony arrangement of Will’s song “Osceloa’s Last Words” on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW-TmL-PCKE . (Red Henry and Chris Henry–guitars, Jennifer Obert–fiddle, Barbara Johnson–bass).

After performing it was time to pick, and pick we did, until late at night. On Saturday Chris and I led a well-attended mandolin workshop, playing some music and answering lots of questions, and selling a good many CDs and Murphy Method DVDs afterwards. Then we backed up our friend Dale Crider on his afternoon set for a lively crowd. There was more picking that night, and Dale showed up to sing lots of our old bluegrass favorites from when we were learning to play in the late 1960s.

On Sunday we backed Dale up on another set, and then played our own show at 2:00 on the Main Stage. We had a terrific crowd which (I say modestly) gave us a standing ovation, and then we sold some more CDs and DVDs before hitting the road. We won’t get rich playing at folk festivals in Florida, but you know what? We’ll be back!

Red

P.S.– Next shows:

Gamble Rogers Music Festival, May 1-2, St. Augustine

Florida Folk Festival, May 28-30, White Springs

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Posted in By Red, CDs, DVDs, Video clips, jamming, shows | 2 Comments »

Consistency (Flying and Picking #8)

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Murphy had a good slow-jam session with her beginning students last night. I heard about it just after I came in from flying, and it reminded me that we often hear questions about how it’s easier to play on some days than others, and about how a student might learn a tune pretty well and then (in spite of playing it every day) not be able to play it as well on some days as on others.

Well, I can testify that flying is sure like that. My latest flights with my instructor have been at night. Last week I was able to make pretty good landings every time, but last night I started off with a great landing but then, on the next three landings, I couldn’t duplicate it for anything. Tonight we’ll fly, and I expect I’ll do better– at least, on SOME of the landings! Getting them just right is only partly a matter of practice. Sometimes it’s the situation, and sometimes you can’t tell what it is. But I couldn’t land at all unless I’d practiced it a lot. Practice helps!

Playing music is the same way. You can learn to play a tune and practice it until most of the time it sounds pretty good, but then there will be days when it just doesn’t. Every time you play a tune, it’s a little different. There may not be anything in particular you can point to as the cause, but you just simply play better on some days than on others. But practice helps! And it’s a special help if you play along with other people, or (if there aren’t many pickers near by) with our Slow Jam and Picking Up the Pace DVDs.

This doesn’t just apply to students! Professionals also find differences in their playing from one day to the next. Sometimes they’ll get frustrated with that on stage, but their overall level of playing is so high that most of the listeners can’t tell the difference. Sometimes it’s a matter of practice, and sometimes it’s the situation. Sometimes you can’t see a reason for it. But after you play a lot on stage, you know to just keep playing and act as if the music’s good– because it is! You’ve practiced a million hours in your life, so just play. And the point of your being there is so that the audience can enjoy it.

Red

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Posted in By Red, Learning By Ear, Practice, jamming | 2 Comments »

Square Dancing and Banjo Playing

Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Murphy Henry

Murphy Henry

I’ve discovered square dancing (modern square dancing—circle up four couples) and have fallen in love with it! I started taking lessons last September and at first it was no big deal. Fun, but I didn’t obsess about it.

Then, in December, my new square dancing friends Marion and Tony pestered me into going to a real dance. OMG (as we say now), it was so much fun! So then we went to a dance the next weekend, and soon we were going every Friday and Saturday night. This on top of the now THREE lessons we were taking every week. Obsessed? Just a little bit!  (I even wrote a gospel Square Dance Song that you can listen to right here and download for free!)

So what does this have to do with learning the banjo?

Well, with square dancing, once again I found myself in the role of student. Sure, I knew some of the basic moves (from a college PE class!): do-si-do, allemande left, right and left grand, head ladies chain. But “make a wave”? “Boy run around the girl”? “Allemande Thar”? (What’s a “thar”?) “Flutterwheel”? And their definitions of “shoot the star” and “cloverleaf” weren’t anything like what we did in Georgia where we circled up just four people (two couples) and buck-danced like crazy the whole time.

So, I’d learn something at the Thursday lesson, go home, not think about it all week, come back the next Thursday only to find I’d completely forgotten it! (Does that sound familiar?) And believe me, I don’t like not knowing how to do stuff. I want to be the one in the square who is helping everybody else! Luckily at the classes we have seasoned dancers (“Angels”) who help pull us through when we have a brain lapse.

Then Tony, a new dancer who seemed to really know what he was doing, told me he was studying the calls on line and learning the definitions of the calls. So I went on line and started studying, too. I’d fill up notebooks with the definitions of calls. I even made diagrams! But that, for me, was about like trying to learn to play banjo from tablature. I could quote you the definition of Spin Chain Through [turn half by the right, ¾ by the left, centers trade, ¾ by the left], but I couldn’t dance it. On the dance floor, there was no time to think! (Does that remind you of jamming?)

The only thing that helped me was—guess what? Getting out and dancing with other people. And the repetitions that come with that. By the time a two-hour dance was over, I had done “Pass the Ocean” so many times that I finally figured out I needed to grab the oncoming girl by the left hand and—hello!—Make A Wave! And the definitions? They are finally starting to make sense now—but only because I can (usually!) dance the moves.

You can see where this is going, right? It’s the third P. PWOP: Play With Other People. Or for me it is DWOP: Dance With Other People. You just have to get out there and do it. It helps if you’re obsessed….and if you have some friends like Tony and Marion to urge you along and join you on the journey.

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Extending your Learning-Limit

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Many of you will recall that in addition to our musical activities, I’m learning to fly. I had a great flight last Wednesday. Snowstorms and high winds had prohibited flying for almost three weeks, so I needed some practice, especially landing the plane. So I took off solo and made 3 landings at the airport here at Winchester, then flew up to Martinsburg, WV and made 10 landings on the big runway there, then came back to Winchester and finished up with 3 more: total, 16 landings in a little over 3 hours.

How did it go? Well, at first the airplane seemed pretty unfamiliar (it had been 3 weeks!) and it took the first one or two landings for me to doing them again. Then, the first several landings at Martinsburg were the best ones I made. When I came back to Winchester I was beginning to get a bit tired, and the last couple of landings could have been improved on. But it took those 3 hours for me to reach that point, and I remember when a 1-hour flight exhausted me, not so long ago. Things are improving fast.

And what does this have with learning to play music? A lot. When you’re learning to play, the instrument may seem pretty unfamiliar in your hands. It can take a while to get warmed up, and then you can get “max’d out” if you play for too long a time without rest. Your ability to learn and to play (and especially your endurance in playing) improves gradually as you go along. At first it might wear your hands and brain out to play for 30 minutes, but after a while you can play for an hour or two without feeling strained. Later, you might get with some other pickers and go all afternoon or evening, and not feel nearly as worn out as you did after a half-hour at first.

Practice, that’s the key. What you’re learning gets better, and easier, as you go along. Practice might not make perfect, but it sure helps!

Red

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Posted in By Red, Learning By Ear, Practice, jamming, lessons | 2 Comments »

Picking with Others is the Easiest Practice

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

Red Henry

Red Henry


Folks, we’ve discussed practice several times on this blog lately. Some of my own entries have had to do with how to keep up with your practice when you don’t have much spare time available. But there are other aspects of practice to talk about, including “What’s the easiest way to practice?” and “What kind of practice is best?”

In my own case, I discovered in 1967 (about a week after I started playing) that for me, picking with others was the easiest and best way to practice. It’s that way for others, too. When you are playing with other people, (1) you don’t have to provide all the musical energy– energy circulates around the group (even if it’s only two or three people) and comes back to help you; (2) practice time passes so much more quickly that three or four hours playing music with others make seem shorter than one hour at home; and (3) it’s a lot more fun. And you sure learn a lot, painlessly. This is why Murphy says over and over at the end of our videos, “Find some people to pick with!”

Now, I know that in some parts of the country (and the world) there are few other players of bluegrass, country, folk, gospel, or other similar material whom you can get with. For example, I spent a year at an Air Force base in Del Rio, Texas, and didn’t find any other musicians that year. Nowadays, of course, things are a lot better: we have our Murphy Method Slow Jam and Picking Up the Pace DVDs, and you can have a jam session any time right in your house!

So as I said, when you’re picking with others, you not only have a better time than in solo practice, but you learn faster. You also begin improvising, and backing up other players, in a live setting where people are having a good time. Playing in almost any kind of group is not only the easiest kind of practice– but the best.

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Keep Your Eye on the Melody

Friday, February 12th, 2010
Casey Henry

Casey Henry

I’ve had a couple little students jams in the last month. After each jam I resolve to hold jams more often, but somehow I never do. This time, though, I really mean it. (Ha! How often has that been said?) Part of the problem is that at the moment I don’t have a group of students who are at the same level. I do, however, have two who are roughly compatible level-wise, and it only takes two people to have a jam, so I decided to go with it.

Ginny (the one who is now flatpicking the banjo) and Jean have enough material in common that we can jam for a good hour. Last night was an all-instrumental jam because my lingering cold prevents me from singing. We didn’t avoid the singing songs (Two Dollar Bill, Worried Man, Mountain Dew), we just played them as instrumentals.

I had a small revelation last night while I was watching them trade breaks back and forth. I’ve been thinking a lot about backup lately because I’m getting ready to film a new DVD teaching backup. Students are often impatient to learn backup because they find vamping boring. What I realized last night was that when someone else is taking a break, you shouldn’t be paying attention to your own vamping — that should just happen by rote (i.e. you should know the chords so well that you don’t have to think about them). You should be paying attention to, and watching, what the lead player is doing. The only reason students get bored vamping is that that’s all they’re thinking about. If you’re bored, then you’re not doing the right thing.

To use a sports metaphor (which I hardly ever do, but this one seems particularly appropriate): keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on the melody.

When I was in eighth grade, I played basketball for our middle school team. One particular game sticks in my memory. I played forward; I was never much of a ball handler. We were down at our end of the court, trying to score. One of my teammates had the ball and I was between her and the basket. She was dribbling, dribbling, then she shot. The moment the ball left her hand I turned and looked toward the basket, hoping for the rebound. Unfortunately, her shot was considerably short and instead of hitting the basket, it hit me in the head. Yes. Hit me in the head. Why? Because I took my eye off the ball.

If you’re playing lead, you’ve got the ball. If you are vamping, you should always be looking at the person with the lead, ready to take it at a second’s notice, or with no notice. When you hand off the lead, you need to follow it to its destination (the other player) and make sure it gets there. Once it’s there, what do you do? Keep watching! You don’t want it to come back and hit you in the head.

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Posted in By Casey, jamming | 3 Comments »

Out of shape picking? Get in shape!

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Red Henry

Red Henry

You know, in many parts of the country, this time of year there’s not much going on musically– few festivals, few shows, maybe not even any picking parties to keep up your playing ability. In my case I’ve been distracted by flying a lot since November, and by late January I got pretty rusty on the mandolin. So what do you do?

I simply started playing some every day. Not a lot, because I didn’t have enough time and energy to spend an hour or two at it, but last week I started playing 15 to 30 minutes a day. And it sure helps! Just a short practice, every day, can get you back into shape without a lot of stress and strain trying to play for hours on end.

Now, I admit that the music comes back into my fingers easily partly because I’ve been playing for a long time. But even when I’d only played for a year or two and I was going to school, I found that when the schedule was really crowded, if I could play 15 or 20 minutes each day, it really helped.

You might not learn a lot of new material with short practice sessions, but you might be surprised at how you can preserve the skills you already have. Take it easy on yourself. Review the tunes from Beginning Banjo Vol.1 or Banjo for Misfits. So? What are you waiting for? Today’s 15 minutes starts now!

Red

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Posted in By Red, Practice, jamming | 2 Comments »

Flying and Picking (5)

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
Red, Jan. 13th

Red Henry, Jan. 13th

Folks, a few days ago I had a great first cross-country flight with my flying instructor. After carefully plotting our course, winds, and checkpoints, we flew down the Shenandoah Valley to an airport 63 miles away, and came out right on target. I mean, we weren’t a hundred yards off course when we got there. In fact, we were exactly lined up with the airport’s runway.

Now, how do you make things come out exactly right on a flight like that? First you do your homework, getting all your preparation as right as you can get it. Then when you get into the airplane and take off, you get in a rhythm. You constantly check your altitude, airspeed, and heading, to make sure you’re going exactly right. At and between your checkpoints, which are about 10 miles apart, you check your course on a chart to make sure you know exactly where you are. You get into a rhythm. After each checkpoint, you start getting ready for the next one. This combination of preparation, thinking ahead, and staying in rhythm makes your flight end precisely, and safely too.

So how can you apply this to playing music? In plenty of ways. Now, we practice at home and learn new tunes not only for our own amusement, but mainly (at least in my case) to get with a group of other musicians and either pick or perform. This means, that when you’re at home, you need to do your homework. Practice your tunes, and stay in time. As Murphy says, don’t play any parts of the tunes any faster than you can play the hardest parts. (Our two “Slow Jam” DVDs are perfect for developing this skill.) You need to have your arrangements down, so that you can play them in good time without having to think about every note.

Then when you’re in a group, you can not only play the tune, but also pay attention to the other musicians while you’re playing — listen to the rhythm, and stick with it. If there’s a particularly hard part in the tune, you have to stay in rhythm while you play it. As you play each phrase (your checkpoints) listen to make sure you’re still with the others. And then, when you’ve navigated your way through your break so that you reach the end (your destination) right together with the other players, be thinking ahead to either hand the tune off or end it, and at the end, it’s a great musical experience for everybody.

Flying and picking– I love it.

Red

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Posted in By Red, Learning By Ear, Practice, jamming | 1 Comment »

Listening with Your Eyes

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
Red Henry

Red Henry

Folks, that might seem like a strange title for a post, but I just wanted to point out how musicians sometimes seem to evaluate instruments on the basis of what they look like, rather than what they sound like.

This really comes into play with banjos, and the musicians are well aware of it. They know that others will evaluate their music partly on the basis of what kind of instrument they play. For example, I recently saw a band photo session where the banjo player hadn’t brought her banjo, and she was going to have to hold a banjo brought by one of the other band members. She was a bit alarmed by that, and said, “Is it a crummy banjo? I’m not having my picture taken holding a crummy banjo!” Fortunately, this banjo had ‘Gibson’ on the peghead and looked even older than the one she’d left at home. So she held it happily in the photo. That was a banjo she didn’t mind being seen with.

I was reminded of this another time at a big picking party. A friend of ours owned one of the quite valuable Gibson F-5 mandolins from the early 1920s. He couldn’t come to the party, but sent the mandolin there with another friend of ours, who handed it to me to play.

Now, the jam session had been going loud and long at this point. I had no problem with that, since my two mandolins (Randy Wood #1 and #3) will cut through any number of banjo and guitar players, and the pickers certainly weren’t giving me any slack. But then I started playing that old F-5, and suddenly everything changed. The whole jam session quieted down to hear that $100,000 Gibson mandolin– and they needed to. The instrument was not remarkable either for tone or for volume, and it couldn’t have been heard otherwise. So the pickers were using their eyes, not their ears, to evaluate that mandolin, and they quieted down to let it be heard. They hadn’t done that when I was playing my Randy Wood, which was frankly a much better instrument.

So, next time you’re in a group of pickers, really pay attention to what the other people’s instruments sound like. Don’t listen with your eyes, listen with your EARS!

Red

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Posted in By Red, Learning By Ear, banjo, jamming | 1 Comment »

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